Tradition and Belief

Looks at early religious texts and their influence on medieval literature and culture. Looks at early religious texts and their influence on medieval literature and culture. In this major study of Anglo-Saxon religious texts-sermons, homilies, and saints’ lives written in Old English-Clare A. Lees reveals how the invention of preaching transformed the early medieval church, and thus the culture of medieval England. By placing Anglo-Saxon prose within a social matrix, her work offers a new way of seeing medieval literature through the lens of culture. To show how the preaching mission of the later Anglo-Saxon church was constructed and received, Lees explores the emergence of preaching from the traditional structures of the early medieval church-its institutional knowledge, genres, and beliefs. Understood as a powerful rhetorical, social, and epistemological process, preaching is shown to have helped define the sociocultural concerns specific to late Anglo-Saxon England. The first detailed study of traditionality in medieval culture, Tradition and Belief is also a case study of one cultural phenomenon from the past. As such-and by concentrating on the theoretically problematic areas of history, religious belief, and aesthetics-the book contributes to debates about the evolving meaning of culture. ISBN 0-8166-3002-XCloth£34.50$49.95xx ISBN 0-8166-3003-8Paper£14.00$19.95x 232 Pages5 7/8 x 9November Medieval Cultures Series, volume 19 Translation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press